CANNES, FRANCE. Much improved since I last posted, the Cannes Film Festival celebrated its midpoint in train-wreck fashion, its wagon to hitched to The Tree of Life.

The first screening of Terrence Malick's long-awaited new movie, three years in the editing, ended with in a moment of near total silence, followed by short fuselage of irate boos and an answering burst of applause--thin, but impassioned. Were the international critics gathered early Monday morning to bear witness to The Tree stunned or stupefied? (To judge from the instant raves found in the trades, the answer is both.)

Malick goes one on one with God, not to mention Stanley Kubrick, and on both counts comes up short--very short. Tree of Life, which opens with God addressing Job from out the whirlwind ("Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?"), is nothing if not overweening in its spiritual ambition. It's essentially a religious work and, as such, may please the director's devotees, cultists, and apologists. I doubt however that it will make many new converts.

Less a narrative than a symphonic praise-song, The Tree of Life has middle-aged Jack O'Brien (silent, anguished-looking Sean Penn), revisiting in memory his intermittently idyllic childhood, played out in a bucolic suburb of Waco, Texas; it's a past dominated largely by the high-handed antics of his autocratic father (producer Brad Pitt) and the capers cut by his elf-princess mother (Jessica Chastain). There are also two younger brothers, one of whom dies in his late teens. Jack meditates on this, as well as the nature of creation, intermittently visualized in a flood of IMAX Discovery Channel images that range beyond the moon and under the sea, across the desert sands and even to a world populated by CGI dinosaurs.

More than any other Hollywood filmmaker, Malick has a capacity for the sort of off-center compositions, small camera moves and sudden blurs or shifts in light one might associate with Stan Brakhage. Unlike Brakhage, Malick is not a man to keep his sense of perspective or his big ideas to himself. The word "cosmic" is insufficient to characterize his notion of the O'Brien family or describe the movie's audiovisual bombast. (Malick accompanies his images with Mahler, Bach, and--after Mom points to the sky and says, "that's where God lives"--a bit of Hatikvah.) There are many whispered pensées and, in the movie's oddest sequence, a brief trip downtown where young Jack and his brothers get to see the real world of drunks, poor people, and miscellaneous geeks.

The Tree of Life has plenty of incident but, despite Pitt's memorably bullying performance, very little human interest. (The best bit has a bunch of boys launching a frog in a bottle rocket.) Malick's craftsmanship may be everywhere evident but, however flashy and intermittently beautiful, his filmmaking can be shockingly banal. Inspired scenes (a toddler relating to a baby) or shots (a mega close-up of a can kicked out of the frame) arrive as morsels floating in the movie's primeval soup.

Whereas Malick's The Thin Red Line maintained a dialectic tension between James Jones's novel and Malick's adaptation, as well as battlefield combat and Emersonian transcendentalism, the tension here seems to exist in Malick's head. The Tree of Life is less profound than profoundly eccentric, while too solemn, pompous, and genteel to be truly crazy. The movie disengages the mind, even as it dulls the senses.

for players. They come in an assortment of colors, the colors that represent famous football clubs being the most popular. There are a variety of styles and designs to choose from.

You can get your jerseys customized as per your preferences like getting the name of the team imprinted on the front of theCheap Packers Jerseys and the name of the players and their number on the back. You can also get your logo if you have one, or choose

from the range available on your jersey. It will give a very professional touch to the team, whether you are a school team, college team or a team of friends.

for players. They come in an assortment of colors, the colors that represent famous football clubs being the most popular. There are a variety of styles and designs to choose from.

You can get your jerseys customized as per your preferences like getting the name of the team imprinted on the front of theCheap Packers Jerseys and the name of the players and their number on the back. You can also get your logo if you have one, or choose

from the range available on your jersey. It will give a very professional touch to the team, whether you are a school team, college team or a team of friends.

The Tree of Life awakened many of my lost senses that use to connect me to nature as a child, I can relate with the father figure, for my dad was very much alike when I grew up on farm close to a small town with lots of trees - trees was everything to me!

This film catches all the small detail of life and the most precious moments of growing up that we often miss or forget about! For example simply touching the grass and reconnecting to nature!

My message to grown-ups (I am 29) is not to forget how you saw the world as a child!

J. Hoberman, whom I once (a long time ago) admired as a reviewer, in his old age has come, like so many movie reviewers, to resemble the Jack Nicholson character in Carnal Knowledge, unable to get off unless a movie fulfills every one of his increasingly narrow and personally arcane criteria. For me Malick's movie offered one of the few instances in the last couple of decades of a truly ambitious film that actually challenges the conventions of conventional storytelling. As far as being a 'convert', It was the first Malick film since god knows when that I actually enjoyed. However, only a provocateur like Lars von Trier (see his review of Melancholia) can still get a rise out of Hoberman because, well, he happened to be in a good mood that day. (I just saw that film and liked it as well. I was happy to see that Kirsten Dunst was actually given an opportunity to act.)

I liked the film. I particularly liked the performance of the thoughtful sensitive angry protagonist boy and the scenes of sibling love and rivalry. No reviews comments about the children's candid performances or about the theme of fraternal relations. The whole film is about this. After the initial scene about the death of one of the brothers, that memory is present and inflects all subsequent scenes of earlier memories. This is not a film about Edenic childhood. It is a coming to terms with the loss and the terrible moments in the past. The scenes with hated overbearing and possibly abusive father and the child's desire for simple gestures of love from a terrible father figure, choleric, repressed and distant father who retreats to some hidden part of himself with the music, and a sensitive brother, the mother's favorite son, whom we know will eventually die, are memorable.

The cosmic stuff is extra--you can take it or leave it. It does not affect the film too much. Nor do the reveries and fantasies of reconciliation and the afterlife that come to him as an epiphany in the midst of a possible debilitating midlife depression. They are fine too. I loved the oblique angles and flash images which conveyed perspective and the sense of memories.

Well what can I say Jim but you're wrong. "The Tree of Life" is exquisite! While the bulk of it seems to be a narrative it's really a whole a series of audio-visual moments offered in a calm even, almost hushed style. If ophuls had a steadicam he would have made cinema that looks like this. It's about fathers and sons, brothers and brothers -- and dinosaurs. At certain moments I had no idea of what was on the screen -- all I knew was it looked so damned beautiful.

As for Bakhage as a point of comparasion you're way off the ark. The film it's most like is David Brooks' "The Wind is Driving Him Towards the Open Sea" (1968). You're one of the few people I know who has actually seen that little masterpiece by the Jean Vigo of the "New American Cinema."